OBJECTIVE To determine whether non-linear blending technique for arterial-phase dual-energy abdominal CT angiography (CTA) could improve image quality compared to the linear blending technique and conventional 120 kVp imaging. MATERIALS AND METHODS This study included 118 patients who had accepted dual-energy abdominal CTA in the arterial phase. They were assigned to Sn140/80 kVp protocol (pr...

Blending attacks are a general class of traffic-based attacks, exemplified by the (n − 1)-attack. Adding memory or pools to mixes mitigates against such attacks, however there are few known quantitative results concerning the effect of pools on blending attacks. In this paper we give a precise analysis of the number of rounds required to perform a blending attack for the pool mix, timed pool mi...

BACKGROUND Olive oils (OOs) show high chemical variability due to several factors of genetic, environmental and anthropic types. Genetic and environmental factors are responsible for natural compositions and polymorphic diversification resulting in different varietal patterns and phenotypes. Anthropic factors, however, are at the origin of different blends' preparation leading to normative, lab...

Various blending functions can be applied in the volumetric modelling of clouds. This paper analyzes the impact of five different blending functions (linear, cubic, Wyvill-1, Wyvill-2, and cosine) on cloud shape, structure, and area. We have found that there are only negligible differences among them. Therefore, we can conclude that the simple linear blending function satisfies all the desired ...

The virtuality continuum describes the degrees of positive virtuality under the umbrella term mixed reality. Besides adding virtual information within a mixed environment, diminished reality aims at reducing real world information. Mann defined the term mediated reality (MR), which also considered diminished reality, but without the possibility to describe different degrees of fusion between a ...

A common method for constructing blending Dupin cyclides for two cones having a common inscribed sphere of radius r > 0 involves three steps: (1) computing the (−r)-offsets of the cones so that they share a common vertex, (2) constructing a blending cyclide for the offset cones, and (3) computing the r-offset of the cyclide. Unfortunately, this process does not always work properly. Worse, for ...

Macau’s unique cultural identity as a Special Administrative Region of China has been attributed to its historical blending of East and West and the confluence of the diverse origins of its people. According to definitions from the Bank of English, blending includes: “mixing and mingling”; “to look good together, harmonize”; “a mixture produced by blending.” In terms of the blending of people a...

Blobtrees are volume representations particularly useful for models which require smooth blending. When blending is applied to two or more Blobtree models, extra volume will be created in between the two surfaces to form a smooth connection. Although it is easy to apply blending, it is hard to accurately control the resulting shape. More complications arise when the blended objects have large s...

Stockpiling and blending play a major role in maintaining the quantity and quality of the raw materials fed into processing plants, especially the cement, iron ore and steel making, and coal-fired power generation industries that usually require a much uniformed feed. Due to the variable nature of such materials, they even come from the same source and the produced ores or concentrates are seld...

This paper presents an image blending approach which combines optimal seam finding and transition smoothing for merging a set of aligned source images into a composite panoramic image seamlessly. In this approach, graph cut optimization is used for finding optimal seams in overlapping areas of the source images to create a composite image. If the seams in the composite image are still visible, ...